20 Facts About Dorothea Bate

Dorothea Bate had an older sister and a younger brother.

Dorothea Bate had little formal education and once commented that her education "was only briefly interrupted by school".

Dorothea Bate was later disinherited by her parents in order to provide a dowry for her brother to marry a wealthy woman.

In 1898, at the age of nineteen, Dorothea Bate got a job at the Natural History Museum in London, sorting bird skins in the Department of Zoology's Bird Room and later preparing fossils.

Dorothea Bate was probably the first woman to be employed as a scientist by the museum.

Dorothea Bate was a piece-worker, paid by the number of fossils she prepared.

In 1901 Dorothea Bate published her first scientific paper, "A short account of a bone cave in the Carboniferous limestone of the Wye valley", which appeared in the Geological Magazine, about bones of small Pleistocene mammals.

Dorothea Bate later undertook expeditions to many other Mediterranean islands, including Crete, Corsica, Sardinia, Malta, and the Balearic Islands, publishing work on their prehistoric fauna.

Dorothea Bate's days were spent on foot or mule, traversing barren and bandit-infested terrains and sleeping in flea-ridden hovels and shacks.

Dorothea Bate was in her late 40s and well respected.

Dorothea Bate worked on the basis that alterations in the frequency of species of animal hunted by early man reflected naturally occurring changes.

Dorothea Bate worked alongside the archaeologist Professor Dorothy Garrod in the Caves of Nahal Me'arot, where excavations had commenced in 1928.

Dorothea Bate was the first to study the faunas of the area, her stated research aim being the reconstruction of the natural history of the Pleistocene fauna of the Levant region.

Dorothea Bate described several new species, and identified several species that had previously not been known to have existed in this area in the Pleistocene.

Dorothea Bate constructed one of the first quantitative curves of faunal succession, and in reference to ancient climate she identified a faunal break between primitive and modern mammal communities during the Middle of the Ice Age.

Dorothea Bate identified the shifts from deer to gazelle dominance as rooted in changes of regional vegetation and paleoclimates.

Dorothea Bate was the first to identify a Canis familiaris to have lived in the Ice Age, based on a skull that had been found.

Dorothea Bate's pioneering research was published in 1937, when Bate and Garrod published The Stone Age of Mount Carmel volume 1, part 2: Palaeontology, the Fossil Fauna of the Wady el-Mughara Caves, interpreting the Mount Carmel excavations.

Dorothea Bate compared the relative proportions of Gazella and Dama remains.

In 2005, a 'Dorothea Bate facsimile' was created at the Natural History Museum as part of a project to develop notable gallery characters to patrol its display cases.